Aspergers and the genius/nerd stereotype

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Yes, you're like me, I used to struggle with handwriting but ever since I started school my spelling was always best in the class, I could spell most things. Friends and family always come to me if they can't spell a word and I always think to myself, how the hell can you not spell such a simple word, it gets annoying sometimes when people ask me all the time how do you spell this and that. A spelling bee would have been a great idea. I don't think they do that here in the UK but I know what It is.

Autism means genius, like autism means being a Wolfman.

I was never diagnosed with ADHD, only aspergers but I am sure that I did have that also, both my biological parents were autistic, they met at a special needs school. And my family has a history of mental conditions from Autism, ADHD and schizophrenia. I hear that a lot of autistic kids are good at school and misbehave at home due to the stress and anxiety of being at school, for me, I think I acted up badly at school because I was not allowed to be myself at home, I was bought up in a posh stuck up family where I had to be perfect. My adoptive mother and father couldn't accept that out of his 3 kids, I was the odd one out, he didn't like the fact he had an autistic son so I had to act normal at home, I was under a lot of pressure to do so because if I acted myself, differently, I'd be severely and violently punished and beaten. They abused me for being autistic and I was terrified of my adoptive parents and I suffer from PTSD now in my adult life. I never felt safe. As well as being physically abused, I was left out, made to stay at home while my parents took my NT brother and sister out for the day, swimming and to the adventure park in case I had a meltdown and acted weird in public. At school I think I could no longer carry on acting normal so without my parents around, I let it all out, I acted myself, pretty Much a total nut case with a few screws loose as they say as it took no energy to simply be me and it was a break until I had to go home at the end of the school day. I would speak my mind say the most offensive things without realizing I was upsetting people and not understanding why they were upset by what I said. A funny time I had was when I got told of for apparent sexual harassment to a male teacher, I said to him, "I'll slap your ass and ride the ripples" and apparently it was sexual harassment. I would do anything other students told me to do without realizing they were joking or trying to get me in trouble like the time a few guys jokingly told me to grab this girls boobs and I did it and got excluded. Another reason I caused trouble is because me and a friend would break into the upstairs of the school when it was all locked up during lunch and hide from the teachers in a empty classroom because it was empty, I felt safe there as I didn't fit in on the playground, it was the only safe place because I was severely bullied on the field, playground and cafeteria until I was allowed to go home for lunch and then was given my own empty room to sit in with my friends to escape the bullying. I dreaded going home at the end of the day, the place where I was never allowed to be a kid. I think I had too much on my mind to concentrate. It was a huge weight off me when I finally moved out of my parents house. I do have most of the aspie traits, overwhelmed by crowds, don't do eye contact, stimming and the list goes on. It was a huge weight off me when I finally moved out of my parents house and Into a flat with my friends. An end to over a 10 years of pretending to be something I'm not, pretending to be normal. My flatmates accept me for who I am. Also I think much of my anger and the way I sometimes came across as violent and aggressive is because I was physically beaten up and abused as a toddler by my birth dad who broke my nose for crying, and then put into adoption because of this, only to be physically abused and mocked by my adoptive parents so violence was all I knew.

I dropped science subjects before O levels . It took me two goes to pass Maths O level. I was especially poor at geometry.
I started off quite well academically but began to decline after the age of 9-9.5. I guess I was a slightly below average student as a teenager .
I don't think it helped that I may well have had a learning difficulty including executive functioning difficulties , slow processing speed and (visuo)spatial deficits .

Of course back in the 60s/70s children of above average, or average, intelligence tended not to be flagged for learning difficulties. It was long before the days of what Americans call 'gifted but learning disabled' or 'twice exceptional'. To my teachers I was just disorganised and messy; a mediocre student.

I have heard about these Asperger's syndrome stereotypes in the media, and I do not think any of them apply to me at all.



Here is the way I really am:



I am not a genius at all. I have never taken an IQ test, but I think my score would be no better than average intelligence.



I did poorly in mainstream elementary school, which my parents withdrew me from. They transferred me to a small private school for special-needs students at the end of my fourth grade. I attended this school until the eighth grade, when I was enrolled in a small special-needs high school. After high school, I attended a transition programme at a similar type of school. I did well academically, but I was never a straight A student or won any awards; at best, I just got passing grades. My schools assigned homework every night, and I would spend almost my entire night struggling to work on it, and sometimes I would not even do the assigned homework I was assigned for subjects I hated, like mathematics, literature, and biology. I was never the "teacher's pet." I detested mathematics & science, which were my weakest subjects. I did particularly bad in algebra, geometry, and physical science. I actually had to stay after school a few times to have my teachers work with me privately one-on-one to improve my grades.



I never went to college, and I actually got my first job with the help of the school I attended. I do not think I could get in to any college or university, and I never received any invitations or acceptance letters from any college. I do not have academic degrees besides my high school diploma.



I do not talk to people endlessly about some obscure subject that I have a fascination with.



I do not dress in nerdy clothes, but I do not wear any kind of "flashy" clothing either. I just wear average-looking clothing because it is comfortable for me, and I do not want to show off. I also do not wear glasses.



I am very unsophisticated with computers & electronics. I do not have much interest in science or technology.



I work a part-time job as a lowly library aide with a limited income.



If I had to name 2 things about myself which is true to the stereotypes, it is that I have trouble making friends, and the fact that metaphors & figurative language are confusing to me.

According to others that I work with, I fit the stereotype quite well as a "super nerd" among the other nerds in my department. C'est la vie.

I don't get sensory overload at parties. I just don't like parties that much because of being shy and not being interested in drinking or dancing. So I just end up sitting about, only talking when spoken to, and feeling tired or bored. I get tuned into the loud music, and the lights don't bother me and I don't even notice smells.
I get more overwhelmed in crowded shopping places, and noises like kids shouting and loud motorcycles or loud traffic does get to me.

I fit the info-dumping stereotype to a "T."

I'm not that great with computers. When there's a problem, I can sometimes resolve it. Other times, I cannot.

I feel like I'm fairly intelligent. I'm no genius, though.

I went to both special schools and "regular" schools. I was pretty much a B, rather than an A, student. I did well at college, though.

I wear chino-type pants, polo or button-down shirts. I seek to keep myself clean with daily showering.

I have some eccentric habits. I don't have much of a filter.

I fit the "weird," rather than the Aspie stereotype.

Intelligence has always seemed like a weird topic to me. Personally I've always felt pretty average in intelligence, sometimes it seems like my family are all talented- and then there's just me, the mediocre one. The annoying thing about being the younger sibling is that you tend to get compared a lot to the older sibling, and she's always been the academically gifted one. *sigh* I always hated school.

Then there's my younger cousin, he gets all the praise because he picked up on things way faster than I ever did.

Well what can I say....

I utterly failed at school and left without any qualifications despite being told how intelligent I was. Mind you its hard to obtain qualifications if you don'y actually turn up for school. Personally I found social peer exclusion and getting the crap beaten out of you several times a week to be something of a barrier to learning, it was much safer to get my mark and jump the fence. I was really good at this and got a way with it for the last two year of school (I left aged 15)


My maths are shocking. although I like dates which mark events or indicate pieces of legislation. My issue with maths is that I just can not remember the sequence in which math problems need to be solved. That said in recent years I have obtained lots of qualifications for work. I am a qualified college teacher (Health and Social Care) and have just completed a masters level post grad is autism and Asperger syndrome, it would be fair to say I am something of a autism geek. Autism is my special interest and has been for many years.

I was thinking about this subject last night, and I had an interesting thought:



Doctors & other experts who study autism & Asperger's syndrome have identified all of these traits of many people on the spectrum, and when "autism awareness" became more common, the trails which the experts have written about have become these media stereotypes that people always hear about, and society only thinks of Aspies as all being this way, and not being unique individuals who are all different. I do not know if it is true because I do not have any proof, but it is just my theory.



Not long ago, I read somewhere that someone said that "when you meet one Aspie, then you have met one Aspie." I truly believe this phrase to be true.

I love parties, at least when there are enough people there I'm friends with. And as long as the music is no annoying mainstream music. Home parties usually don't have music that loud, for everything too loud there are earplugs.
It's always different if I know only one or two people at a party and the rest of the people are like... people that are really NT and different from me and have different interests and behave differently. I start to feel really lost then, because there's usually now way I can bond with these people.
But, usually I got to parties where most of the people work in IT and/or studied CS, and I'm sure some people are a bit on the spectrum.

I don't have any issues with light and also not with smell (except for strong pork smell, but luckily, that's quire rare). I love music anyway (also many genres of music). I have no problems being with many people in one room. I've been to festivals with over 100.000 people.

I DO have sensory issues, though (overreaction to certain noises like sirenes, motorcycles, jackhammers, drills and a really high sensitivity to pain).

I'm really good with metaphors and figurative language. I'm very good with language and words in general.

(You might not believe me, because my English is definitely not perfect, but this message board here is a good place to practice my English skills, at least )

I was a prodigious and precocious kid. I taught myself genealogy, history, law and politics at age 13 years. Despite testing extremely well, I was bored in school, yielding a high-school cumulative grade of C- and a university cumulative grade of D- by the time I removed myself from education altogether. I earned a high-school equivalency diploma in just three hours of testing (when they allowed me five hours), completed my college-entrance test with high scores, and, as a result, was allowed to waive one or two classes.

At the same time, I taught myself enough about law to practice it as an administrative-law attorney for veteran and active-duty service members seeking disability claims. While at college, I challenged the requirement of students to provide their U.S. Social Security Administration account number (SSAN) as a student ID number. After a year of consideration, my university acquiesced, and agreed to change its rules governing ID numbers. When I helped another student register without providing a SSAN shortly thereafter, the clerk (who was oblivious about me) referred to the new rule as the "[my name] rule."

I went on in my 20s, 30s and 40s to write or help write laws, administrative rules, and policies for governments and various corporations in my state. I became a political activist, and a writer, designer, marketing director, lobbyist and public-relations professional. I worked with world leaders and celebrities among others.

But, I became exhausted with my work and the toll it took on my spinal problems. I pursued a diagnosis for autism two years ago next week, after a year of being screened with autism. Having gained the diagnosis (my diagnosticians offered to refund part of my fee because I had "done so much of their work" for them), I found myself not wanting to continue living in my professionally magical world anymore. People would (and often still do) treat me like a human version of Siri or Alexa. They ask questions of me to fill in their conversations when they forget a factoid, word or name. I hate it.

Because of my various workplaces and pursuits, I have been ridiculed and shunned by individuals who resent me. I love my skills, but they haven't served me well. I seek privacy and anonymity every chance I can find.

So, I guess I fit the stereotype, even though I am terrible with maths and pure science beyond their basic usefulness.

LOL...I've never heard a Yank refer to "math" as "maths"